The Old Man and Me by Elaine Dundy Read Free Book Online Page B

C. D. He’d got my number from Smitty. He wanted my address so that he could send me flowers.
    “That won’t be necessary,” I said primly.
    “No, but it’s essential,” he replied. And could he give me lunch tomorrow? And would I accept his word that this evening would never be referred to again?
    What had I got to lose? I thought. Nothing. And maybe the world to gain. And so I accepted with pleasure his invitation to lunch.

5
    “Funny menus seem to be my fate in England,” I remarked, studying the one at the Half Moon Hotel in Abbington Lane near Shepherd Market where C. D. had decided to take me to lunch that day.
    It was a decision that had not been lightly reached, artist at living that he was—all possibilities had been thoroughly explored and exhausted before arriving at it. It would have been too soon, for instance, for us to lunch again in Soho. And too soon for him ever to lunch again in one of those little Chelsea restaurants where, according to C. D., on top of the outward physical discomfort of sharing half a seat and being forced to choose between the roles of performer or audience (impossible, said he, with strangers virtually in one’s lap to be both) was the inward one of trying to digest the globs of tomato-and-garlic sauce invariably used to cover the mediocre food. Especially for one whose digestion, as he confessed, was not presently at its most robust. There were always, of course, the grand restaurants: the Reserve, the Mirabelle, the Ritz but as an American I’d no doubt seen dozens like them in my country. And the City had excellent food too, but the atmosphere of the business man’s lunch depressed him. We would begin fresh. We would lunch at a place neither of us had before. He remembered the Half Moon Hotel. It was small and quiet. He’d never lunched there but he liked the look of it and had heard good things about it.
    We were sitting in its pleasant high-ceilinged dining-room at a table near a window overlooking the winding street with its enchanting view of flower boxes and flower barrows and fruit stalls, of gaily painted doors and glistening bay windows and highly polished brass; a view so quaintly, unmistakably,
aggressively
Olde London—a miniature Nation of Shopkeepers going on at one of the corners, shopkeeping old English antiques and old English First Editions and old English shoe-repairs and old English butcherings and bakings. And then picking up the menu I read:
Toast Radjar
,
Toast Ivanhoe
,
Ogorki Demi-sel
...
Crème Waldeze
...
Consommé Ecolière
...
Filet de Plie Orly
...
Poulet Braconniers
...something else
Champvallon
...
Charlotte Printanière
...
    “What’s so funny about it?” asked C. D.
    “Only that I can’t make head or tail of it. In America we generally get to know in advance what we’re eating. Like that menu at the Truite Bleue with all that offal. Ugh, it was
offal
,” I added wittily.
    C. D. looked at me unsmiling. “You find it so odd? You must tell me about yourself. I really know so little about Americans—although I had an American wife. Did you know that I had an American wife? She died last Spring.” He seemed in a rush to get it all out. “It was very sad. We were only married four years. Pauly Saegessor was her name before. Perhaps you knew her?”
    “No,” I said lying.
    “I didn’t think you would. How did I get on to her anyway?”
    “Something about food.”
    “Oh, yes. I was wondering if all Americans shared the same lack of enthusiasm for food experimentation. Am I to conclude that civilized American eating habits are so very dissimilar to
European or English ones?”
    “We tend to stick to what we like. I’d never dream of having anything but a hamburger for lunch back home,” I assured him.
    He smiled, thinking I was kidding. I wasn’t.
    “Oh, sometimes maybe a couple of hot dogs with an orange drink for a change if I’m near a Nedicks.
Delicious
.”
    This made him less sure and he hid behind the menu. Suddenly